Matters

Links on the Semantic Web | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs: "On the Semantic Web, links are also critical. Here, the local name, and the URI formed using the hash, refer to arbitrary things. When a semantic web document gives information about something, and uses a URI formed from the name of a different document, like foo.rdf#bar, then that's an invitation to look up the document, if you want more information about. I'd like people to use them more, and I think we need to develop algorithms which for deciding when to follow Semantic Web links as a function of what we are looking for.

To play with semantic web links, I made a toy semantic web browser, Tabulator. Toy, because it is hacked up in Javascript (a change from my usual Python) to experiment with these ideas. It is AJAR - Asynchronous Javascript and RDF. I started off with Jim Ley's RDF Parser and added a little data store. The store understands the mimimal OWL ([inverse] functional properties, sameAs) to smush nodes representing the same thing together, so it doesn't matter if people use many different URIs for the same thing, which of course they can. It has a simple index and supports simple query. The API is more or less the one which cwm and had been tending toward in python."